Saving Grace: Reconstruction Rescues a Michigan Barn

Houzz Contributor. My name is Bud Dietrich and I am an architect located in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. I am licensed to practice architecture in Illinois, Florida, New Jersey & Wisconsin and I am a certificate holder from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB). Since 1996 I have worked from my home office and provide full architectural services exclusively to the single family residential market. My passion is to transform my clients' houses into their homes. I strive to have the "new" home accommodate my clients' lives without fighting them at every junction. I look to add curb appeal to encourage a beautiful streetscape. And I design any addition to look and feel like it has always been there.
Our projects have won numerous design awards as well as having...

Houzz Contributor. My name is Bud Dietrich and I am an architect located... More

One of the first pieces I wrote for Houzz had to do with my love of barns. Barns are just wonderful structures. A renovated barn is old and full of character, simple and large in its form. It's capable of containing a range of spaces, and it's handmade and industrial — as well as an antique that has had new life breathed into it.

So when I stumbled across Northworks' Michigan barn project, I instantly wanted to learn more. What I found out is that the owner's history with the property meant this barn had to be saved. It would have been less work and less costly to tear down the existing building, but we are all the better because the owner stuck it out to create something entirely new from something old and dilapidated.

The renovated barn is all white and new. White is a terrific color for this barn, as it sets the structure off against the green of the landscape and the blue of the sky.

Working barns need large openings to get animals and equipment into the barn. For renovated barns the openings are how the interior stays light and bright. Sliding barn doors, iconic features of such a structure, increase the visual size of the opening to respond to the scale of the barn's broad side.

And what's a barn without its stone foundation and base? This permanent and massive stone base provides just the right counternote to the seemingly transient wood frame structure above it.

The opposite broad side has another barn-door-size opening. Both openings are filled with steel-framed glass walls that visually fade away, letting the openings read as large rectangular voids in the larger solid rectangles of the barn's walls.

The barn's original silo was kept as a vestige of the structure's original purpose as part of a working farm. In this way the silo continues to connect the owners and others to the memory of the place.

The renovated interior contains the original barn structure within rebuilt exterior walls. Given the scale and rhythm of this structure, it was smart to have the living area at one end of the barn, a two-story kitchen with bedrooms above at the other end and a large, two-story space in the middle.

In fact, the barn had to be temporarily supported and raised to construct the new foundation and lower level. While this kind of effort put into saving an old building is common in Europe, it's really rare in the U.S. The architect, Austin DePree of Northworks Architects and Planners, says that keeping the structure intact while lifting it and building the new foundation was the most challenging part of the project.

The new foundation walls are reinforced concrete covered in stone. With this new foundation in place, work on the actual wooden barn structure started. First the wood siding was removed and saved for reuse.

Here's what the barn looked like right before the renovations started. While there are many who would have thought the structure was beyond repair, thankfully the owner and her team weren't among them.

Wow - the first before photo is shocking! Even in Europe most people would have torn that barn down. Or disassembled the structure and put it back together after building the foundation. Anyway, the result is stunning.

Another fascinating and well-photographed article about a fantastic property, Bud! Do you have a rough idea of the budget for this one?

I particularly appreciated the before-and-after shots. We had a century barn taken down a couple of years ago, and the materials are stacked waiting for re-use.

It was a beautiful barn, larger and in much better condition than the one in your story, actually, and we even have photos of it being built, back in the late 1800s, and they are spectacular. They were often built as "kits" by roving teams of carpenters, so they come apart really easily, and surprisingly quickly, yet they're amazingly robust in the worst weather.

None of the pro barn developers would take our barn for any more than cleaning up the site, yet they sell them for a HUGE profit. I appreciate the labour that goes into this, but for us it just didn't make sense. We're better off re-using the materials as we renovate the house, building fences or firewood with them, and selling what's left to other like-minded romantics on Craigslist!

It's such a shame, because there are many many gorgeous old barns dotting the North American countryside, mostly empty because they don't suit modern farming practices; farmers deserve a reasonable $ for them, but the developers aren't prepared to pay a fair price (yet the home-owners pay BIG bucks), so there they sit, rotting away...

The silo and the two interior "corncribs" atop the loft conceal an elevator and the master bathroom, completing the illusion of a working barn. An old corncrib would have had gaps in the siding to allow air in, so we designed spaces between the boards in those structures, At night they glow like lanterns.

rcmtnitt, I also wondered about the lack of apparent insulation....in Michigan. What an awesome project, though ! I'd love to see something like this done, by people who didn't have a budget the size of a small country, though. I plan on finally getting into,(this will be a transition from 2,500sf to 1,300sf for us ! With a teeny shower that I'm not sure my Husband will even be able to stand totally upright in !), the little house on a lovely property, and our restoration budget will be in the neighborhood of....oh wait, we can't even afford a budget ! We'll have a lot more fun, I think, being able to brag on how LITTLE we spend, to redo the little house !

Great project, I love the final results. I recently finished a kitchen project in a converted barn so this type of project peaked my interest, more kitchen pictures? Here is my before and after along with a kitchen shot.

Judging by the pool in the basement, their budget must have been astonomical. Glad they were able to save this barn. Most barns in Michigan are not as fortunate. I like the way they transformed the bank into the front steps. Would have been nice leave the tall grass shown in the "before" picture but I know tall grasses attract snakes and other critters. The "after" pictures give it a completely different feeling. We renovated a one-room schoolhouse and tried to retain the quaintness and ambience the place started out with. That was our biggest challenge.

I like the before and in progress pictures too. It really shows the amazing amount of work done on this project. I hope it is a livable house with the heating and cooling. Thanks for the article Bud and the additional notes Northwoods Architects and Planners about the use of the corn crib and silo. Great inspiration for my own project.

The architects nailed it on this project. The choice of materials from the barnstyle awning windows to the metal lofts highlights the spare aesthetic charm of barns. Living in the upper Midwest, I notice these old decrepit gems everywhere and hope someone has this type of vision to save them.

Gorgeous! Oh, how I wish I could afford renovate my old barn for living - right down to a pool in the lower level! Sadly, I can't even wrap my head around how much it would cost, and it's quite a bit larger than the one shown here.

Upon closer inspection of the pictures, you can see that the barn is insulated as the architect stated. It looks as if they used a rigid insulation outside of the boards that you see from the inside frame and the siding on the outside....very clever detail!

That is awesome and a dream of mine I have always had to turn a old barn into a home,I would love to know what the cost of this would be, I live in Md and there are some many old barns here, could you send me some information about the cost and possibly somebody in my area that does this sort of work ,like I said I live in Frederick Md and Im very close to WVA.My email is samhankins1965@yahoo.com. If you have more pictures of barns that have been restored that would be great. Thank You Suzanne

Love, love, love what you have done with the barn! I would like to see you do something with the silo. We have a 50 foot concrete silo that we have turned into living space. It has six floors in it including an observation tower on the top. Would be a really nice addition to your barn as well. Will attach a few pics. If you are interested in seeing more pictures, I can forward them.

This is an absolute dream come true structure to home wow! From each slat to plank and bar across the lefts, kitchen bar stool layout, i am much moved and highly impressed...and realieved to see that my dream (home)is not dead. It is in tangeable form and well accomplished here. What an incredible dedication to re-create such an inhabitable space... I am just over the top rebuild...

We were in Leelanau County summer before last. During a walk my husband and I came upon an old barn in the beginning stages of what looked like a major project. Does this barn happen to be in Leelanau County?

Love looking at the pics on this project, great job. I would like to get in touch with Jim Zeichman who commented on this project. I am going to be purchasing the one room school house that four generations of my family attended school and would love to see pics from the one room school he renovated or anyone else that has renovated a one room school house. Can anyone tell me how to contact Jim Zeichman. Thanks, Sherry at smills@ktis.net

Wow. This is gorgeous. I could very happily live here, even though I grew up in Duluth and swore I would never live anywhere ever again where it snows. Beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, cannot come up with any better adjectives.

Awesome! I drive by that home often and always thought it was go great that they saved that barn. It was fun to see the interior since I was curious how it looked. Now I know it's as terrific as the rest of the property :) Glad their labor of love has gotten recognition.

jaxsue, the project is located about 2 miles north of Harbor Springs on Hoyt Road. There is a large barn that was converted to a residence. Two old, smaller barns were renovated into a maintenance barn and the smaller one was a crafts shop closer to the road. Alot of additional buildings were added for a horse ranch after I did my work on the three old barns. I have not been back for about 10 years.

I was going to comment the same as kkupnorth. It was so wonderful to come upon this article and the pictures of the inside. My husband and I wondered if this was a home and what the inside looked like. Thanks so much - love going past this place and it's great to know more about the property.

Slmills, I saw your comment and will e-mail you this weekend. But just in case, if you read this, my e-mail is jczeichman@gmail.com. Yeah, over the course of twenty-five years, we got to know every brick on a first name basis. We also learned a lot about one-room schoolhouses in general.

Another great article Bud, and lovely pictures. A great advert also for how mild steel windows and doors can add light and finesse to these large openings. Black framed steel windows really do lend themselves to these types of buildings and create a sense of the windows being an organic "part of" the building - not "sticking out from it". Understated quality is often the best type. Keep up the good work.

This is very lovely. I did the design work for my sister's barn makeover in Illinois. They pressure washed the interior and did not need to take off the siding. We specified SIPs (structural insulated panels) for all the walls and the roof, creating a totally new structure over the old and allowing the newly cleaned interior wood to be the showcase. They built a basement foundation using insulated concrete forms. The barn was actually moved from the old location to the new foundation, about 300 feet. Fun project and great results.

This is my friends grandma's house it's so lovely inside and out, there's so much that don't show you. She has an elevator and a guest house in her basement and also right in her backyard is another house that resembles a barn on the outside. Even the garage looks like a barn and just outside the garage there's an outdoor pool. It's really beautiful.

I own the barn in the article"Saving grace" . We built it with aGreat crew, nitz design builders and architect Austin depree. It Was a very happy collaboration. Thanks to everybody involved,Especially IS.